Category Archives: Cooking

I have decided to become a master chef. Not like, open a restaurant and hand people food because absolutely not, but like have people over and be all, “Hey, I made all this food and guess fucking what it won’t kill you.”

Most of you jagweeds have some knowledge in cooking but I, on the other hand, have relied for 32 years on the following method:

Frighteningly accurate depiction of my life.

Grab bowl.

Fill with cereal.

Fetch tiniest spoon (obsessed with small utensils, it’s fine).

Shovel in general face direction.

This is not entirely my fault. The folks were terrible cooks. Even easy stuff, like my dad’s idea of making a healthy breakfast smoothie was putting milk, chocolate, heaping spoonfuls of sugar, and raw eggs into a blender.

Raw. Eggs. And that’s just the tip of the cow-tongue-filled iceberg.

So in a turn for a better life, I honest to god have been giving cooking the old college try. Bought a cookbook, try to go out less, traipse around farmer’s markets in floral prints, and prepare actual food in the kitchen that came with this apartment.

Some friends have suggested that I try Blue Apron, but wtf. That’s the IKEA of food delivery. If you’re going with a home food delivery option, you know you can buy that shit already put together, right? Boggles the mind.

Anyway, so in the past two days of kitchen dickery, it’s a goddamn miracle San Diego is still standing.

Monday, I decided to make some variation of quinoa spaghetti. I know what you’re thinking:

It’s a gift. So about a month ago I had two stovetop pots in which I’d cook. With the largest of the two, I went to use a vegetable steamer to prepare a sweet potato. Well it ran out of water without my knowing (besides the burning smell, but everyone ignores that, right?) and I was just frying the shit out of the non-stick bottom. Like it bubbled up and hardened when it dried, just terrible. I laughed it off, washed it and put it lovingly back in its cupboard.

A couple days later I showed it to a friend, who’s already large brown eyes grew about twice their size. Horrified, he raised them up to meet mine.

“You know that non-stick stuff is where they keep the cancer, right? You’re not fucking cooking with that.”

I dunno, who knew? But I obliged and in the garbage it went.

Whoops.

Back to Monday, with that larger one deceased, I resorted to using a tiny saucepan for the spaghetti. We’ve covered that I like tiny things, so this felt like a win-win.

Working from home, this was to be my fancy ass lunch. I went to boil water and in went the spaghetti. Well wouldn’t you know my phone rang and thus began an impromptu meeting, all the while spaghetti boiling.

Upon my decidedly delayed return to the kitchen, lo did I discover I had boiled out all the water. All. Of. It. All the pasta stuck blackened to the sides of the pan like lovely little angel haired carcinogens. In the garbage it went.

Frustrated, I decided to abandon the idea for the remainder of the day and went out for dinner, took home leftovers. This was a solid plan because that’s TWO whole meals I didn’t have to bother destroying.

Happily I went to a client’s office the next day, food in tow, already packaged in its neat little togo container. Thought to myself, “How nice that it’s not in a styrofoam container, because you can’t microwave that earth polluting shit.” Lunch comes, pop that fella in the microwave, set timer for 2 minutes. Went back to work while it warmed its little self up.

Well that’s when I started hearing a sharp, loud, popping sound.

It didn’t dawn on me for a couple seconds that it could be my fault the break room was under attack, but then went to investigate. Peaked in the glass microwave window, AND EVERYTHING WAS ON FIRE. Flames were lighting up rapidly all around the sides of the container, as meanwhile I danced around helplessly like a goddamn moron wondering, “Oh no! But if I hit stop, is this going to fucking kill me?!”

Proving this actually happens in real life.

Decided to chance it and hit stop, and thank the murkin-loving lord that the fire immediately extinguished. It was quickly known that I was the fire starter, and in between bellowing fits of laughter, inquiries streamed in to the tune of, “How do you not know that you can’t put tinfoil in the microwave?!”

IN MY DEFENSE. You do put tinfoil in the oven. The oven is a hot place, too. And it also happens to be a place wherein food is warmed. AND said microwave had zero damage and can live another day. I think that’s enough for exoneration.

Anyway, it’s going to be a long time until I can have you over for delicious/edible/non-cancerous food, but mark my words, I’ll keep trying.

Around 3:00am each morning I wake up to finish the glass of water on my nightstand. It’s a phenomenon as predictable as a conservative watching Fox News. Then of course, I get up to refill it because let’s face it, I need to be prepared for the next time I wake up with insatiable thirst.

This obsession with water leaves me wholly convinced that in a past life I was a severely dehydrated desert animal. I simply can’t seem to quench my thirst, and never have been able to. Seriously just try getting in my car and viewing the back seat filled with water bottles and not think I make a living recycling.

So I’m up this morning and groped my way through the dark into the kitchen – and it smelled horrible. There was no visible smoke but it was definitely the smell of burning flesh.

Ok it wasn’t burning flesh but it smelled REALLY bad.

I checked the oven for the usual burned pizza I normally forget about, but no black frisbee was to be found. Then I remembered….I wanted fake chicken nuggets right before bed. (Yes I’m a vegetarian and no I don’t miss bacon. Those fake nuggets are crispy, they are juicy, and they are DELICIOUS.)

I carefully opened the toaster oven and there lay 4 pathetic black strips of protein. Sadly their dead carcasses looked up at me, never knowing the joys of being drenched in ketchup and low fat ranch dressing*.

*My roommate gives me shit about my low fat choices. “Why not buy the better tasting full fat and just eat less of it?” she frequently wonders out loud in my general direction. “Uh, because I slather burritos in sour cream, soak pizzas in ranch, and put mayonnaise on not one, but both, slices of sandwich bread?” Trust me I’m doing you all a favor, you don’t want to see full fat mayonnaise Joni running around the beach.

Why oh WHY can’t I cook anything ever? This particular circumstance can be explained by vodka – I may or may not have been out and about much earlier in the evening and perhaps there were people of the handsome male variety generously providing libations. I won’t confirm nor deny this possibility, but let’s just say I got home and wanted a snack, then determined that laying down would be better.

But even when I’m completely coherent. I can’t NOT burn the shit out of everything. My home is the place grilled cheese sandwiches come to die. All tofu scrambles are deep south cajon style, see image 1.

My point in all this is – I have finally realized that I am absolutely required to date and be friends with ONLY persons who can cook. I’ll die if I don’t. Die of eating only cereal and mac and cheese, or simply by burning the house down.

Bonus if you are a spider killer. My god I am the most PATHETIC person when it comes to spiders. I decided to wash my car yesterday and wouldn’t you know there was a giant spider just under the faucet. After my fit of screams died down, I ran to get the fly swatter and our all-natural (garbage) bug spray*.

*I mean really. Why would you buy “all-natural” bug spray? That shit is intended to MURDER, slay, annihilate bugs, their families and the ecosystem as we know it. A mafia in a bottle, dressed up in 40’s gangster attire with the kill success rate of Tony Montano. But no, we have the all-natural hippie Joan Baez of a spray, which is merely a gentle ass perfume that makes the house reek for 3 days. Her excuse is that we have a couple dogs…but they eat grass and cat shit, so I’m pretty sure they can handle a little bug spray in the air.

I stabbed the spider with the fly swatter sideways, shrieking all the way and blurting profanities about the spider’s family. I of course left the dismembered body coated in all-natural bug soap to warn the others that this, THIS, is the place where they would die should they trespass.

Unless it’s in a frying pan, in which case the spider would be burned like my poor sweet, now inedible, fake chicken nuggets.

Yesterday was one of those days. I had a bit of a sore throat and my fiancé knew I wasn’t feeling well. So what did he do?

He went grocery shopping for some of my favorite foods, and went to the library to rent a couple of movies. We built a fort in our living room, he cooked dinner, and we just stayed home making the best of my not-feeling-so-hot.

One of those movies was one I have wanted to see for quite some time called, Julie & Julia. The long time that I’ve wanted to see it has been about 2 weeks, since it was advised to me in a writing class that I took 2 Saturdays ago. The instructor suggested it for bloggers and budding writers, and damn was she ever right.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a simple feel good plot, juxtaposing the lives of a government worker, Julie, in modern day New York, and Julia Child, as she was finding her way to Parisian cooking fame in the 1950’s. Meryl Steep and Amy Adams played loveable parts, extremely relatable to me in my situation.

The big ties that these women had in common were that they both were searching for their purpose in life, loved food, cooking, and both were writers. Julia Child stumbled into a cookbook writing opportunity in her journey to find her passion in life while living in Paris. Julie decided to start a blog about cooking her way through the aforementioned cookbook. There are few plot twists and little angst, so it was an easy watch leaving me feeling good about the general world, believing that if I busted my ass like these women did, maybe I could get somewhere too.

Also, I was deeply craving anything French to eat, and would have killed for a Brie smothered baguette.

There were a few things I was left dealing with afterwards however. Both of these women had the most incredible and supportive husbands, who stood behind them in their journeys. My fiancé certainly fits the same bill. Could this mean I have a chance too?

Julie had a terrible, awful government job, and found that blog writing pulled her away from this work. The blog gave her hope outside of a thankless profession. My job isn’t awful and terrible, but blog writing is something that is completely mine, and really the only place where I truly don’t have to answer to anyone.

The challenge I am facing today is the same that I face just about every Monday. Yes, it is Tuesday so it’s not quite so bad, but I would give anything to be able to stay in this chair in my living room writing. The very last thing I want to do is go to my office, and currently I’m measuring just how sore my throat still is and if that will be enough of an excuse to call in sick and perhaps finally get this new website put together.

Oh the things I could get done! All my different supporting pages could finally be written. I could upload proper pictures that fit the theme and purpose of this blog, so that those images currently revolving on the carousel at the top of the page isn’t Scott and I being newly engaged. I could get all of the widgets I want put into place, and figure out what I’m supposed to do with my old blogging space on wordpress.com!

But, I can’t. Julia Child may have had the good fortune to live in Paris and take cooking classes for fun, but I don’t have this luxury. And neither did Julie – she still had to go to that government job for the year that she was completing her challenge of cooking all of Julia Child’s recipes. But at the end of the movie, things got better for both women.

There are two particular moments that got me out of bed at 5:45am this morning. The first was when Julia opened an envelope outside her new home in Massachusetts, and the incredible joyful shrieking that occurred. As I type this, the memory brings goose bumps to my arms. That moment when after many rejections and heartbreaks she learned an editor finally wanted to publish her cookbook. The other moment was after Julie was interviewed by the New York Times about her blog, and the story was published for all of New York to read. When she returned home from work that day there were 63 messages on her machine, all from radio hosts, magazine editors, television producers, wanting to offer her deals and ways that they can use her story.

So alas, I must bid you a farewell for now. And hopefully this evening I can get a little more work done. A happy Tuesday to you, whoever may be reading this. I do hope that you are there and that you have a wonderful day and start to this week.